I’m returning on a jet airplane…

I’m waiting in DFW for a connection back to Charlotte. I was in College Station the past couple of days attending a conference put on by my friends Steve and Kerry Beck, the owners of FamilyEbiz. I’ve known Steve and Kerry for the past few years and it was good to hang out with them for a couple of days. If you are wondering how you can start a business on the internet without dealing with all the slimeballs that exist out there, Steve and Kerry are the people that you want to work with.

This week was extreme productive. I submitted an update to one of client’s iPhone apps to Apple’s AppStore. Now we wait. It’s been taking about 2 weeks recently to get approvals or rejections. Hopefully this one will go smooth.

I also took some time this week to install and play with the latest and greatest from Terracotta including Ehcache. The demo was really straightforward, but now I get to have the fun task of upgrading an existing installation to the latest version and also doing an initial implementation with an open source ecommerce solution. These should be a fun few next weeks 🙂

I also gave a presentation at the Charlotte JUG on iPhone development and simple and easy integration with RESTful Java services. If you were there, thanks for showing up and hopefully you got a lot out of the presentation. Here’s the links to my GitHub account with the presentation and sample application that we built in the presentation:

If you find anything that I messed up, please let me know and I’ll fix it.

Finally, I’ve started working on a couple of Android projects. My first action was to go and look at the Upcoming Big Nerd Ranch Classes and see if they were offering the Android class they have any time soon. Unfortunately, the class isn’t until February and it has 2 strikes against it for me to attend:

my daughter’s 17th birthday is that week

the Super Bowl is on Sunday before the Monday the class starts. Just in case you didn’t know, we celebrate 3 major holidays around our house; Christmas, Easter and the Super Bowl.

Notice I didn’t mention price. Yes, the class is $3500, but your lodging and food are included in that price. And the food…oh…the food… If you haven’t taken a course with Big Nerd Ranch at Banning Mills in Georgia, you need to at some point in your career. I think you will really enjoy it.

Back to Android…I clicked through to the instructor’s (Mark Murphy) website for Android Development. As soon as I saw I could purchase all his books in digital form (including Kindle!) for $35/year, I quickly went and signed up for the subscription. I haven’t been disappointed. I wish I would have had books like Mark’s when I was starting out doing iPhone development.

The books are not a beginner’s guide to programming, but they are a very good hands on newbie guide to Android development. The tutorial book takes you through step-by-step of exactly how to do development from the command line and giving you challenges on how to do the same in Eclipse. If you are considering dabbling in Android development, I would not purchase any other books except for Mark’s. I’m still working my way through them, but I feel like I’m going from zero to 60 in a really short time.

Well, it’s about time to board so I better wrap this up. As always, if you have any questions or comments, leave them in the comments section below.